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It can surely be no coincidence that humanity used these words and ideas connected with “being a man” to sell poppers at exactly the same time in human history that ideas of freedom blended with sexuality to form such a thing as a gay male identity.
The ads promised power and potency, the chance for one man to fuck another until their pecs exploded.
“These people have sex twenty to thirty times a night,” he said on the programme. “A man comes along and goes from anus to anus and in a single night will act as a mosquito transferring infected cells on his penis. When this is practiced for a year, with a man having three thousand sexual intercourses, one can readily understand this massive epidemic that is currently upon us.”
OMG! How funny! No human being has that kind of stamina. Only, if!
By 1986, as Narayan showed, morality had crept in. The twin fears of sex and death hampered any chance of a humane response to the illness.
William F. Buckley was the loudest, arguing in newspaper columns that people living with HIV should be tattooed with their status and undergo forced sterilisation.
Buckley has always been of the same mentality that required "tatooing" of Jews in Nazi Germany. And, how would sterialization have helped? What a self-serving pig!
Traditionalist voices like these used the atmosphere of fear caused by HIV/AIDS to campaign against any way of living beyond a traditional family model. There are two things going on here: first, an incorrect assumption that a “family” only constitutes a man and a woman and their own conceived children; and second, that the sex that takes place outside of this model, especially bum fun between two men, is therefore destructive, harmful and dangerous. Throw in HIV and their sex also becomes fatal. These twin fears of sex and death pre-dated HIV/AIDS, but they are left darker by that crisis.
We wear frames fitted with lenses so we can see the world.
Margaret Thatcher told parliament on January 29th: “Some people, whether from the Church or elsewhere, had spoken out to the effect that morals do matter in AIDS and that, while Governments cannot prevent people from getting AIDS, people themselves, by their own conduct, can do so.”
